Love vs Labels.

I’m in a WhatsApp group with two of my best friends and this morning I woke up to a message from one of them sharing an Instagram post which said:

“Situationship – Let’s just chill, have sex, and be confused on the fact that we’re not together but have official emotions for each other.”

Her message said: Aislinn, are you in a situationship?

This comes off the back of them knowing pretty much every detail of my single life and my experience with online dating and how, for the past couple of months, the hot topic has been: Do you say “I love you” before you label each other boyfriend/girlfriend or after? Which is the bigger commitment?

Now, obviously there’s no right answer to this – you do what feels right and that’s different for everyone, but it has been fascinating to hear each others arguments, especially given that we’re now all in very different stages of relationships. One of them is about to get married and is expecting their first baby, the other has been with her boyfriend for 10 years but they’re currently living apart and are working on their relationship.

Then there’s me, nine months into dating a new guy after ending my nearly ten year relationship. Following that break-up, I had a messy, painful, will-we?/won’t-we? situationship which was more painful than my actual break-up. I was single for 6 months before I started dating and during that time did a lot of work on myself (there will be an upcoming post on “Doing The Work”).

I started dating because I had never dated before and wanted to experience it and because there’s only so much work you can do on yourself before you have to start putting that theory into practice. Maybe I’ve watched too many movies, but I loved the idea of getting to know someone over drinks or some cheesy first-date activity. I wanted to experience it all, good dates, bad dates, but not necessarily second dates. I wasn’t looking to get into a new relationship, I just wanted to experience dating. But as is always the way, you find things when you’re not looking for them and so here I am, nine months later, exclusively dating Watson and I told him last week that I love him.

So, to answer the question of are we in a situationship? No, we most definitely are not.

Watson and I have a relationship in the same sense that you have a relationship or relate to anyone. The dynamic is called a relationship and we refer to what we have as a relationship but we’re not yet ready to take on the commitment of being boyfriend and girlfriend. It's like we're still in the probationary stage. At this point if one of us decides it’s not working, we can end things with no further questions asked and with no expectation to work on it and make it work.

Please don’t think for one moment that if he did turn around and end things that I wouldn’t be absolutely gutted. The difference now is that I know that there are plenty more fish in the sea. I’m not pinning all my relationship hopes and dreams onto this one guy. I’m not with him because I think that there’s no one else out there or because I don’t think I can do better, I’m with him because I want to be and choose to be. I found him and caught feelings for him at a time when I thought I would never get over Situationship Guy (who I was convinced I’d spend the rest of my life with) and as a result he’s given me the best gift I could ever receive.

He showed me that I could love again at a time when I thought I couldn’t.

He helped me get over a guy I thought I never would.

He taught me that you never know how you’re going to feel and that you can find love again even when you think you won’t.

So even though my heart would break if we parted ways, I know now, because of him, that I would eventually meet someone else and fall in love all over again; and that really is the greatest gift anyone can give a hopeless romantic like me. As a result, this is the healthiest and most secure relationship I’ve ever been in. Although I hope he never leaves, I’m not terrified of that happening. It would suck, but I know I would be ok. I don’t need him.

The way I see it, once we label each other, we're officially choosing each other and saying "I choose to be with you and to make this relationship work. I commit to working at it and maintaining it." And that’s the difference.

What I’ve written next has turned out to be highly revelational for me. I’ve had an epiphany that I’ve been on the verge of for some time, but like most of my epiphanies, it needed to come out in writing.

What I was going to go on to say was:

Having spent my entire adult life in a long-term relationship, to me being someone’s girlfriend is a lifestyle choice. It’s a role I take seriously. In my experience, being in a relationship means sharing your lives together. That, to me, is the difference between being "seeing" someone and being in a relationship with them. If I’m going to be your girlfriend, then I am all in.

At the moment, our default is that we're living very separate lives. If we became an official couple, I would expect the default to be that our lives would become more intertwined and that we’d see each more often. I’m not saying that I would expect to start living in each other’s pockets, I don’t want that, but I would be looking to take a more prominent role in his life and give him a leading role in mine.

The other big thing is that at this point in my life, if someone asked me to be their girlfriend, I would want to know: To What End? If we enter into a “proper relationship” then "seeing how things go" wouldn't fly. I would want to know where he sees the relationship going and what our future together might look like. I’m not willing to pour that amount of energy into a relationship if the guy doesn’t see it lasting. If that’s the case then we can carry on doing what we’re doing and having an amazing time together without me committing to the lifestyle choice that is being in a relationship. It would be a waste of energy if we weren’t on the same page and in that sense, we wouldn’t be energetically matched.

That’s why I'm not ready to be anyone’s girlfriend yet. At the moment, I'm really enjoying not trying to plan a future with someone, having spent nearly 10 years doing that and it not working out in the end. I'm still recharging my relationship batteries after the last one. Right now, I don’t have the energy to spend on a committed relationship because I still have things to heal and that healing takes up a lot of time and energy. I do want all those things for us in the future, but I'm not ready to give that amount of energy and focus to another person and another relationship yet.

In the space of writing that, I had my epiphany.

Situationship Guy once told me that I put my energy where it’s not needed and that if I put that much energy into myself then I would be so much happier. And by God, he was right. I have equated being in a relationship with giving myself over whole heartedly to another person. I even called it a lifestyle choice. I say that I’m not ready for that commitment because it would require so much energy from me; it would be a whole body and soul commitment. But it doesn’t have to be. That’s why it’s called a lifestyle choice.

What if being in a relationship didn’t look like that? What if I rewrote my definition? What if my next relationship looks like continuing to put my healing and learning first (because you can’t give from an empty cup after all)? What if it looked like committing to be the best version of myself that I can be, for my own sake and as an added bonus, for the sake of the relationship too?

I used to wear my prowess as a good girlfriend like a badge of honour, in the same way so many people wear burn-out like a badge of honour. But how is sacrificing yourself for someone else noble? If they don’t match your effort then it only breeds resentment.

What I will still say is this:

It has also been hard work getting used to living alone. In my experience, being someone’s girlfriend means moving in together eventually and I don't want to undo the work I've done on finding out who I am on my own. My identity as a single 30 year old living alone still feels fragile and is still taking a conscious effort to cultivate. I’m actively working on not feeling lonely in the evenings and on the weekends (again, there will be a whole separate post on this) and I don’t want to start living with a boyfriend again until living on my own has become the norm for me.

Right now, it still feels weird. I love it, but it’s not what I’m used to; sharing a home with a romantic partner is what I’m used to. Moving in with someone now would feel like returning to that comfort zone and I know that if it didn’t work out and I moved out again, I would have to start the journey of being ok living alone all over again. I want to be completely ok with living on my own and not feel lonely before I consider moving in with someone else. That way I can be certain that I’ll be doing it for the right reasons. Doing it because I want to create a home together and share our lives together, not because it feels familiar and not because it makes sense financially.

Going back to the question of which comes first, the L word or the label, I think that's why I can love Watson and tell him that I love him before I'm ready to commit to being his girlfriend. I fell in love with him by accident, with no effort on my part. I fell in love with the way he is and the things he does. I couldn't help it. Being his girlfriend would take some effort. It wouldn’t be hard work, but I would make a conscious effort to not let the relationship go stale like my previous one did.

I was chatting to him whilst writing this post and we ended up down a potentially vulnerable rabbit hole, at which point he said "I'm happy with where we are and where we're going." We may not have had The Talk yet, but three things are certain:

We're definitely not in a situationship.

We're happy with where we are.

We're happy with where we are going.